1/13/2011 @ 6:00PM

Wetherby Asset Management

Debra Wetherby was managing money as early as 6-years-old when her family lived in Europe and would ask her to calculate foreign exchange rates.

Her family had moved to Shannon, Ireland, after her father’s employer,
General Electric
, offered him a better position there. “We lived there for four years. My mom would always have me do the foreign exchange transactions. I’d tell her how much things cost when we lived in Ireland, and if we were visiting France I’d tell her what it cost in Irish pounds. I loved it,” Wetherby recalls.

Today Wetherby owns one of the biggest advisory firms in the country managing $2.3 billion in client assets. That puts her at No. 20 on our RIA Giants list. (Click here to see our full list of RIA Giants.) Her team of 15 principals and over 30 operation and support staff provide wealth management services for over 500 clients. Wetherby Asset Management (with offices in San Francisco and New York) offers specialized financial planning, portfolio management and trust and estate planning.

The firm’s 2011 investing strategy is based mainly on the fragility of the economic recovery. As a result, Wetherby has moved assets toward global high-quality multinationals, income-oriented assets and away from the core fixed-income asset class.

But Wetherby wasn’t always managing retail money. One of her first jobs was in Price Waterhouse’s auditing department as a CPA. “I went into accounting because I felt it was the language of business and that if I understood it then I could understand how business works at the basic level,” she explains. After seeing everything from
Chevron’s
shipping to oil tanker operations, Wetherby moved on to Wall Street with
Morgan Stanley
.

It was 1985, and Wetherby was one of 10 female brokers in Morgan Stanley’s New York brokerage operation. She calls her years at Morgan Stanley “a fantastic education” including an eight-month training program, but admits “it was a tough time to be professional woman at any major Wall Street firm.”

When she left and launched Wetherby Asset Management in 1990 all of her clients from Morgan Stanley followed her. “By then I wanted to start my own firm that delivered the quality services you’d get a major brokerage house Wall Street, the attention you’d get from a CFA and the professionalism you’d get from both,” Wetherby says.

Twenty years later Wetherby’s decision to launch her own firm is vindicated in part by the fact that all her Morgan Stanley clients who followed her are still clients today.